bowels them; he tosses the howling dogs that are let loose on him; he leaps and shivers in the air like a very stag or goat. His huge body is nothing to him in the rage and might of his agony.

For Alphonso, who had purposely got in his way to shorten his Lucinda's misery (knowing her surely to be there, though he has never seen her), has gashed the bull across the eyes with his sword, and pierced him twice with the javelins furnished him by his attendants. Half blinded with the blood, and yet rushing at him, it should seem, with sure and final aim of his dreadful head, the creature is just upon him, when a blow from a negro who is helping one of the pages, turns him distractedly in that new direction, and he strikes down, not the negro, but the youthful, and in truth wholly frightened and helpless, page. The page, in falling, loses his cap, from which there flows a profusion of woman's hair, and Alphonso knows it on the instant. He leaps off his horse, and would have shrieked, would have roared out with horror; but something which seemed to wrench and twist round his very being within him, prevented it, and in a sort of stifled and almost meek voice, he could only sobbingly articulate the word, "Lucinda!" But in an instant he rose out of that selfpity into frenzy; he hacked wildly at the bull, which was now spinning as wildly round; and though the assembly rose, crying out, and the king bade the brute be dispatched, which was done by a thrust in the spine by those who knew the trick, (ah! why did they not do it before?) the poor youth has fallen, not far from his Lucinda, gored alike with herself to death, though neither of them yet expiring.

As recovery was pronounced hopeless, and the deaths of the lovers close at hand, they were both carried into

the nearest house, and laid, as the nature of the place required, on the same bed. And, indeed, as it turned out, nothing could be more fitting. Great and sorrowful was the throng in the room: some of the greatest nobles were there, and a sorrowing message was brought from the king. Had the lovers been princes, their poor insensible faces could not have been watched with greater pity and respect.

At length they opened their eyes, one after the other, to wonder - to suffer- - to discover each other where they lay—and to weep from abundance of wretchedness, and from the difficulty of speaking. They attemped to make a movement towards each other, but could not even raise an arm. Lucinda tried to speak, but could only sigh and attempt to smile. Don Alphonso said at last, half sobbing, looking with his languid eyes on her kind and patient face-"She does not reproach me, even now."

They both wept afresh at this, but his mistress looked at him with such unutterable love and fondness, making, at the same time, some little ineffectual movements of her hand, that the good old Duke de Linares said, "She wishes to put her arm over him; and he too—see—his arm over her." Tenderly, and with the softest caution, were their arms put accordingly; and then, in spite of their anguish, the good Duke said, "Marry them yet." And the priest opened his book, and well as he could speak for sympathy, or they seem to answer to his words, he married them; and thus-in a few moments, from excess of mingled agony and joy, with their arms on one another, and smiling as they shut their eyes—their spirits passed away from them, and they died.

LOVE AND WILL.

INDING, upon inquiry, that Steele's little periodical paper, called "The Lover," is still less known than we supposed, we shall here give some account of it, and then proceed to some other reflections to which it has

given rise. We have already intimated,* that it was one of the numerous publications of the kind to which Steele's necessities and lively impulses united gave birth, and which, for similar reasons, were speedily brought to a close. Tonson collected the forty papers of which it consisted into a duodecimo volume, in which he included a political paper entitled "The Reader," which reached only its ninth number; and this is the book now before us. The dedication to Garth is surmounted by one of those rude little wood-cuts or copperplates, half flower and half figure, formerly, we believe, called head-pieces (perhaps still so, otherwise we know not the technical word). It presents us with Sir Samuel's coats of arms (two lions passant gardant between three-cross crosslets) supported, or rather attended, by two Cupids: one with a lyre for the doctor's poetry, and the other holding his professional emblem, the staff of Æsculapius. The first number is, in like manner, graced with a head of Queen Anne, and so is that of "The Reader." We reckon upon our own reader's not being averse to the mention of these amenities, partly from his love of anything connected with books, and

* In an article on "Garth, Physicians, and Love-Letters," in "Men, Women, and Books." - ED.

partly because they help to show the manners and feelings of the times; and we confess we have another regard for them ourselves, owing to school recollections, and to the minutes of bliss we snatched, during the hardness of our tasks, from those figures of Venuses and Amphitrites, which sail along the tops of Ovid and other classics in the edition of Mattaire.

Steele, whether as an attraction, or a blind (if the latter, it was the most transparent of all blinds), puts forth his 66 Lover," as "written in imitation of the 'Tatler.'" He supposes himself to be one "Marmaduke Myrtle," a tender-hearted and speculative gentleman "about town," crossed in love, assisted in his lucubrations by four others, who have met with various good or ill success in their honorable passion for some lady, particularly one Mr. Severn, a young gentleman who is his "hero," and whom he describes in the most exquisite manner of the "Tatler," as one that treats every woman of a certain age" so respectfully, "that in his company she can never give herself the compunction of having lost anything which made her agreeable.” Of this hero, however, we hear nothing further but in one paper, and the author makes but the like mention of one of his other assistants. In short, beautiful as some of the papers are, and touched with equal knowledge of the world and delicacy of feeling, it did not "take," and Steele soon got tired. It went upon too exclusive a subject, and professed too open an intention of discountenancing the town ideas of love, to be acceptable to those who could have brought a man of wit his greatest number of readers; while, on the other hand, Steele had such a healthy and unhypocritical sense of the corporeal as well as spiritual part of the passion, that he offended such of his readers as had chosen to take

him for a kind of sermonizer on love. In one of his papers is an account of an accident which happened to a young lady on horseback in the cross-country road, between Hampstead and Highgate, and which with an exquisite mixture of playfulness and delicacy, he represented as furnishing a sort of compulsory, but charming, reason why the young gentleman who happened to be with her was to be accepted as her husband. With this anecdote some "heavy rogue," as he truly calls him in a contemporary publication, chose to pick one of those quarrels which, by the degrading turn of their thoughts and the stupidity of their ostentation, create the indecency of which they complain; and this, no doubt, did him a disservice with the dull and commonplace, and added to the perplexity arising from his own mixed pretensions. To com- . plete his causes of failure, he was a zealous politician, and, before he had written a dozen papers, could not help falling foul of the Tories; which in a gentleman so absorbed in the belle passion as Mr. Myrtle, was certainly not so well, and must have frightened such of his fair readers as patched their cheeks on the Tory side, and could only fall in love on high-church principles.*

*About the Middle of Last Winter I went to see an Opera at the Theatre in the Haymarket, where I could but take notice of two Parties of very fine Women, that had placed themselves in the Opposite Side-Boxes, and seemed drawn up in a kind of Battle-Array one against another. After a short Survey of them, I found they were Patched differently; the Faces on one Hand being spotted on the Right side of the Forehead, and those upon the other on the Left. I quickly perceived that they cast hostile Glances upon one another; and that their Patches were placed in those different Situations, as Party-Signals to distinguish Friends from Foes. In the Middle-Boxes, between those two opposite Bodies, were several Ladies who patched indifferently on both Sides of their Faces, and seemed to sit there with no other Intention but to see the Opera. Upon inquiry I found that the Body of the Amazons on my Right Hand, were Whigs, and those on my Left, Tories; And that those who had